Web Consultancy Narrative Industries

Chris Smith, one of Narrative’s founders, was extremely chuffed when Wrangler, the long-established fashion brand, approached him asking to use some of his photography for their AW17 T-shirt designs. A professional buyer for Wrangler was seeking-out fresh new creative work and stumbled across Chris’s work online. The photos Wrangler wanted for their Collab Tee range of menswear ranged from stark, graphic photos of brutalist …

EDIT: Check the date of this article before reading its content. Today Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook has bought Snopes.com, a favourite site for fact-checkers wishing to debunk the avalanche of spurious claims and “fake news” that get published on the internet. Facebook has been criticised for spreading posts of doubtful origin, ranging from the slightly misleading to red-hot-pants-on-fire, and people have a habit …

We’ll be talking eCommerce for the small, creative business (with a focus on Shopify), at the Creative Bedfordshire event on 3rd Nov at the Gordon Arms on Castle Road, Bedford. We’ll be giving a quick-start guide to eCommerce as an introduction to those looking to take their first steps. Essentially we’ll be explaining how easy it is to start selling online today, the …

You don’t get many surprises with Netflix. Netflix won’t, for example, suddenly pop a list of Japanese action movies into your results just because they have them available, because that would be unexpected to most of its customers. Netflix aims to provide a better user-experience by curating your results and that’s usually a good thing. Netflix has to work for the masses, across …

Spammers and phishing scams are increasingly turning to url shorteners like Bit.ly, goo.gl, owl.ly etc to mask the dodgy links they send out in emails, text messages and social media posts. Some of these messages are quite convincing and the unsuspecting public can easily click on a shortened URL and get taken to a phishing, malware, or spam site. A recent check showed that over …

Sometimes it can be tricky to explain why Narrative’s 20+ years of specialist digital experience and expertise can be so powerful when it comes to helping businesses perform better online. Then, today I heard this little anecdote that sums it up quite nicely. One day, the Experienced Man, who had been the engineer at Big Company for many years, left. Just …

Before we start take a look at those cute jumping cats. You’re not so interested in what we have to say now are you? In fact some people may have left this page altogether and are now happily searching on Google for more cat photos. You wouldn’t pepper an article with completely irrelevant and distracting images and comments – so …

No-one likes hassle. If it takes a lot of thought to work something out, then people are far less likely to do it. I don’t imagine thats a revelation to you, but somehow many businesses seem to forget about this when designing how customers use their services and driving people away. Even if a customer does use a difficult service the first time, the …

01 April 2016 [ edit: Before reading this, you should probably check the date it was published on ] First it was keywords, then it was inbound links, SSL, social & mobile support and then Accelerated Mobile Pages but the latest innovation to Google’s algorithm appears to favour blue websites, or ones that heavily feature the colour above all other colours. Websites featuring the colour blue …

The other day, I noticed a fellow digital peer was having one of those #FirstWorldProblems moments on social media. “My Internet connection is slow.” he posted, before he added “I’m on a plane. A metal tube. At 34,000 ft… I deserve a kick in the shins…” It reminded me of a similar event that happened to me back in 1997, long before Narrative and …

[ edit – 02 June 2016 : I stumbled across Google says “Passionate People Don’t Use The P-Word… which summarises parts of Erick Schmidt’s book, How Google Works, suggesting that Google share many of the same concerns as I do about people who claim to passionate. ] If I had a penny for every time someone told me they were passionate about one-aspect-of-their-job-or-another, I’d probably have …

Would you like to love your job again? We’re looking for Front-end full-stack web developers to join our expanding team in Bedford. We are a Bedford based digital agency with a great culture and track record. We make our clients’ organisations more effective online through a mix of digital consultancy and creating digital services that are simpler, clearer, faster and so good that people …

Despite having wheels and not actually hovering, the Hoverboard has become one of the most-wanted gadgets of 2015. The self-balancing boards that let the rider glide along while standing perfectly still, giving the impression of moving like a vampire, have become an international craze. They became infamous when hoverboards were made illegal on UK streets and someone has just been charged with using a hoverboard as a …

One of our Founders, Alec East, was interviewed for The Guardian in an article about the entrepreneurial spirit and finding a work-life balance. We only discovered it because we spotted the backlink when checking our professional SEO tools. The reporter was exploring A survey from NotOnTheHighStreet, which showed that half of working fathers were questioning their work-life balance and starting their own businesses to spend more time …

As of 1 December 2015, you won’t be able to create a new account on Fontdeck, the professional webfont service, and it will stop working on 1 December 2016. Obviously we will start migrating affected clients’ sites to one of the many alternatives to Fontdeck with immediate effect and there will be no disruption but the closure of Fontdeck is more than a technical …

It looks like the the way in which we buy online is beginning to settle down. While, overall, online continues to take more share of all UK retail sales, more and more people have been opting to buy through their mobiles & tablets instead of their desktop PC or laptop, until now. According to IMRG and Capgemini, 42% of UK online sales were …

The video clip plays a selection of famous Horror & TV themes. The notes are unchanged but have been shifted to a Major Key instead, providing a very literal illustration of how a simple change of tone can transform how something comes across and how you feel about. I especially like the way the theme from the Excorcist (at 1:30) sounds like …

A few days ago Google announced it was splitting off into a holding company, called Alphabet, and sub sections for search, advertising, R&D, etc. Everyone has an opinion about it but the day I am qualified to give Google business advice is the day I retire to my own private island. What I am qualified to address is the fuss …

People can be averse to change, even when that change is necessary & inevitable. The recent news that the Oxford English Dictionary is adding twitterati and meh have caused a bit of a fuss on the interweb because of this aversion to change, however there’s a more fundamental issue at play and, to truly understand the significance of this, we need to look at the …

The Technology Trust is offering charities a cut-price deal on Shopify, the cheap & powerful eCommerce platform, so we thought it was a good time to pass on some of what we’ve learned building successful eCommerce sites with Shopify. The Technology Trust states ” Shopify is a complete hosted ecommerce solution that allows organisations to set up an online store to sell goods. …

As a society we put a lot of faith in technology; sometimes too much. Every once in a while it’s worth remembering that even the most advanced technology can be every bit as fallible as a human being and, occasionally, it can be as fallible as a very drunk human being. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency have released a compilation of robots …

Like most digital agencies, we occasionally provide our web consultancy services to small community projects, non-profits & third sector organisations for free. Doing pro bono work is, generally, reward enough in itself but agencies are made-up of people and that’s why it’s especially rewarding to be on the receiving end of a thank-you note, like the one we received recently from Cakes …

Convergent Evolution occurs in nature when two species evolve along similar paths because it’s most practical solution to survival. One of many examples is the aye-aye lemur and the striped possum which both have one elongated finger used to get insects from trees, despite being different species living in entirely different parts of the world. We just spotted a similar convergent evolution …

If you dare to visit a website and look for a product, e.g. a Slow Cooker or some car tyres, for next week or so afterwards you might notice that you’re being stalked by adverts for slow cookers and car tyres every time you start web-browsing. That’s re-marketing and it sounds clever and potentially very effective, like a follow-up call …

The internet is disappearing and that’s mostly a good thing. When I first got my hands on a modem, back in 1995, and connected my computer to the Information Superhighway it was a fiddly and unreliable process. I used a Mac at the time (a state of the art Quadra 840 Av with 40mhz processor and 32mb of RAM which …

A huge congratulations to Rhythms of the World music festival who picked-up a Most Innovative Organisation/Business award at this year’s Flame awards. We’re very proud to be part of the award winning team, providing web consultancy to this exceptional non-profit music festival, alongside other amazingly talented people including Cath Cole, Inky Design, Dan Brammall and far too many other people to mention. Rhythms of the World is one …

Narrative is a web consultancy based in Bedford. We help organisations use the internet more effectively. We are currently looking for experienced freelance & full-time PHP developers and/or HTML/JS/CSS coders to join us. If you live around the Bedford area, this is an opportunity to avoid that expensive commute into London and do some well crafted work for an experienced …

We worked with CP Company to make their online retail more efficient. The results are now in and the work we did has proven to have consistently increased revenue and reduced operational costs compared to their previous supplier… and here’s why: Our approach is a lot more integrated and thorough than other agencies. We look at many factors from market trends …

After a two year hiatus, the 2014 Rhythms of the World music festival went off with a bang with a weekend of music, fun and merriment at the Priory in Hitchin. Hertfordshire’s favourite music festival has grown from humble beginnings, with just a few stages dotted around the town centre, to an event that now attracts over twenty thousand festival-goers from across …

Formulas can be really useful. They provide a set of prescriptive rules that, if followed properly, turn out the same results every time. We have formulas for medicine, formulas for drinks and baby formula because we want consistency and reliable results in all those things. Then we have Formula 1 racing which, to many people, pretty much exemplifies the problem …

Many of us of a certain age were deeply saddened by the passing of Rik Mayall. His appearances in such iconic shows as A Kick Up The Eighties, The Young Ones and Blackadder, to name a few, shaped our formative years and had a huge impact on British comedy history. He will be missed. Once more unto the pitch dear friends But …

Eugene Goostman is a 13 year old boy… or, at least, that’s what a number of people in a test at the Royal Society in central London believed. In fact Eugene Goostman is an artificial intelligence programme which managed to pass the controversial Turing Test by convincing over 30% per cent of the judges that it was human. This is …

You know what it’s like: You’re browsing on your smart phone and see a link to something really interesting; you click it and, suddenly, you’re redirected to a cut-down mobile site that refuses to show you what you were looking for. Frustrating isn’t it? Well Google thinks so too and is taking steps to discourage site owners from doing it. …

After Heartbleed comes news that eBay got hacked, once again prompting us to change our passwords to something more secure and wonder if there was anything embarrassing in our watchlists. According to Reuters report on the eBay hacking, all the passwords were encrypted so, even though the hackers have them, it’s very unlikely they’ll be able to do anything with them. …

So, you already know that it’s vital, if you want to successfully promote your business online, that you regularly put fresh content onto your website and onto social media (right? If not then read our post which covers basic digital strategy and SEO). The problem is how on earth do you find the time and how do you create all …

I came across this little ditty which, apparently, was written in the early days of spell-checker. It’s a fun reminder of the continued need for humans to think about what they write and not rely on technology too much. Eye have a spelling chequer, It came with my Pea Sea. It plane lee marks four my revue Miss Steaks I …

The film Groundhog Day came up in a pub conversation the other day. In the 1993 comedy feature film, Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, an arrogant, egocentric TV reporter assigned to cover the annual Groundhog Day event in a small American town. Phil wakes to find himself caught in a one-day time loop; every morning he wakes-up and is forced …

ArcTern Ventures (formerly MaRS Venture Fund) is a privately-run, cleantech investment fund out of Canada and a partner of the innovative MaRS Discovery District. With a wide range of companies in their cleantech investment portfolio covering everything from smart metering to clean energy storage and biofuel, they have a growing list of private investors taking advantage of the huge growth …

Rhythms of the World Music Festival is back for 2014! This year, The Priory in Hitchin will once again play host to Hertfordshire’s favourite festival. The not-for-profit, family friendly festival has been run entirely by volunteers since 1992, supported by grants, donations and the assistance of local businesses, often providing their services for free. The festival attracts up to 30,000 people over …

Search Engine Optimisation is one of the fundamentals of any digital strategy but SEO specialists can be expensive so, as a web consultancy, we’re regularly asked what small business owners can do for themselves. We put together the following short list of SEO essentials; some the basics that professional SEO specialists look for in a site audit. They don’t require any special …

A quick round-up of stuff we liked on the interweb this week, including M&S, Glassholes, Being interesting, virtual changing rooms, and lots of data… but first: We’re giving a talk at Bedford College! It’s on 26th Feb, about the Connected Consumer & Responsive Web Design. Come and join us. It’s free. Design for the Connected Consumer If you check out …

If you look at one thing this week WTF Is My Twitter Bio (NSFW) Crafting an interesting, relevant Twitter bio has never been easy. They can enviable, insightful or a source of cringeworthy hilarity (and not always intentionally), and this Random Twitter Bio Generator takes its inspiration from that. Not for the easily offended, it generates surprisingly realistic spoof Twitter bios, …

Having a memorable domain name is one of the recommended requirements of a decent website but you might have noticed that almost every domain name you can think of has already been taken. The problem is that there was a finite number of .com’s .co.uk’s etc. which is why ICANN decided to release a host of new “top level …

Here’s a quick round-up of what’s been keeping us interested in the Narrative (previously THBOOM!) studio, this week: The Shock of the New. Sometimes we can put too much emphasis something new and misinterpret its popularity amongst the digerati as a sign of its nascent influence, so this article is a good reminder to check the numbers once in a while. How …

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people are talking about Google’s sale of Motorola to Lenovo but that’s not what’s interesting. The sell-off is really just Google having a clear-out and the word-on-the-street is that they were going to put Motorola on eBay if Lenovo said no. The far more significant story slipped through without very much coverage: The purchase …

A quick round-up of what we liked on the web this week, ending 24th July. Conference Call If you’ve ever had to endure conference calls, this video that’s been doing the rounds this week will bring a smile to your face. A classic example of what’s wrong with retail. A bit of a single issue rant, really, when you might …

We consult for a number of cleantech businesses, providing digital strategy, branding & development and, while this particular idea doesn’t apply to us, we really loved the concept behind it. Matthew Anderson is a typographer at 350.org, a grassroots climate advocacy group and knows that fonts can cost a lot of money, and when small voluntary groups or local campaigners …

What does it mean to your business? Windows XP was released in 2001 and has been Microsoft’s most popular operating of the last decade. It was stable, reliable and, for many businesses, there was no financial benefit in upgrading to any of its successors: Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8. Officially, Microsoft stopped supporting it years ago but many businesses …

A highly subjective selection of things we found, were sent and generally liked on the web this week, ending 17th January 2014. Nest Eggs This week’s big news has been Google’s purchase of Nest for 3.2 Billion USD. It’s not often that so much money changes hands so it seems everyine has an opinion on whether it’s the proof of …

First came Microsoft with Windows Embedded Automotive… but it never really got started (see what I did there?). Then, last summer, Apple announced iOS in the Car and this week at CES, Google have announced deals to bring their Android operating system to the car dashboard with the ‘Open Automotive Alliance’. But what does that mean for the average car owner? Well, I …

What is Hummingbird? At the end of September Google announced that it had started using a new search algorithm, which it has named “Hummingbird”. Interestingly at the time Google made it public Hummingbird had already been running for about a month. Some are saying that it’s the most dramatic rewrite of the search algorithm since 2001 (which in web terms …

Even The Economist is reporting on it: tablets & smartphones have taken over and they’re changing the way people use the web & buy online, but it’s surprising how many organisations have yet to make the changes necessary to take advantage of this change. Does your web strategy include mobile? Research firm Gartner recently reported that Desktop PC shipments declined …

A conversion is when someone, e.g. a visitor to your website, does something you want them to, e.g. signs up to your newsletter, makes an enquiry, buys a product etc). A conversion funnel is just a way of describing the individual stages that a person goes through to “convert” from one state to another – this could be converting a …

You’ve got a great product or service. Your customers are happy, your staff are content and your ethics are above reproach. You’ve spent a long time nurturing your website’s SEO until you sit comfortably in top search results but then, one day, you notice that something is wrong with those search results: the next result after yours doesn’t belong there. Perhaps …

Part of the Glossary of Web Terms More than just generating blog posts and stories, Content Marketing is the use of targeted content, distributed through various channels, to achieve specific marketing goals. Content marketing is widely considered the next phase of advertising because, when done well, the audience actually wants to receive the marketing content. Increasingly linked to inbound marketing, a good content …

Soulbay Press is an independent book publisher operating out of London, Sydney and Eastbourne. They specialise in novels whose main characters skirt the edges of convention; they champion poets who flirt with reality and occasionally they uncover and republish old classics. One such republished classic is Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, an acute analysis of social control under modern capitalism …

The Social Learning Network is a new generation of virtual learning environment used by schools across the country. An innovative and focussed company in a competitive field, they were aware that their branding would be an important to contrast them against their competitors. The Social Learning Network is primarily used by teachers & those responsible for educational procurement so the branding …

Narrative Industries Web Consultancy created the branding for Spiral, an online learning resource and part of the Social Learning Network’s range of services. Spiral is aimed at the pupils and takes a more collaborative approach to helping pupils learn. The design had to work for youth but retain the authority of a learning product. It had to be something they …

Amazon have announced a new service to help small businesses take payments online. The catchily titled “Login and Pay with Amazon” is a new payment gateway that enables businesses to take payments from anyone with an Amazon account, and there’s about 100 million of them worldwide. The convenience for the customer combined with the ability to leverage the trust of …

The mobile web, is a generic term – like the terms “one foot experience” or the “third screen” – that refers not just to websites that are suited to mobile devices but also to the behaviour and mindsets of the people using it on mobile devices. It is common knowledge that someone browsing the web on a smartphone will, most …

Keywords are the words (or search terms) people use to search. If you want your website to show up when people search for a specific keyword, that keyword must appear on your site. Competition for certain keywords is very hot and search engine algorithms are increasingly complex, making it much harder to appear in the first few pages for popular …

Responsive is a design approach that ensures websites display correctly across the plethora of devices and screen sizes that people use. Responsive design creates an optimal viewing experience on practically any device and does not require any complex server side code or alternative content. Exactly the same content is piped to everyone, regardless of device, but the image sizes, font …

A call to action (CTA) is a specific instruction meant to prompt a user to perform a specific task. Usually in the form of a banner, button, or some type of graphic or text, they are used to drive visitors down a conversion funnel. Calls to action can (and should) be tested & monitored so they can be refined to generate higher …

Well, you could certainly call this big news for SEO. Google is now redirecting ALL traffic to https. This means that all search terms will now be encrypted, even for users who are not signed in, which means that Google Analytics will no longer show any search query data. For the last couple of years SEOs, Marketers and website owners …

Something of a pejorative term, the Digerati is a name for the collection of people who are visibly concerned with all things digital. The digerati may include famous computer scientists as well as tech magazine writers and technical artists. A particular industry or subject of interest may have its own digerati who may be able to assist with your own …

A profile is the information you give about yourself when you sign up for a social networking site. It’s what used to be referred to as account information but, as the level of personal details increased, the term profile became more relevant. As well as a picture, you can include your interests and passions such as your love of Mongolian …

Robots, bots, crawlers or spiders work for search engines and crawl the web gathering information on new web pages, updating old pages and deleting dead pages. They follow links, some can run javascript and most of them hate Flash.

A Robots.txt file is just a text file that sits on your site and tells the search engine bots to ignore certain folders, such as the admin of your Content Management System. The point of a robots.txt file is to prevent certain files appearing in search results however, search engine don’t have to comply,and the file is readable by anyone …

On-Site SEO is the area of search engine optimisation concerned with what happens on your site. Partly to do with content and partly code structure, on-site SEO ensures all the boxes are ticked regarding where and how often keywords appear, xml sitemaps. Good on-site SEO does not guarantee a good result for organic search, but it does help a lot …

As the name suggests, these are the results pages that you get on a search engine. Go to any search engine and type in a keyword and press search. The search engine results page (SERP) is the page that comes up with all the links to the relevant websites.

Vertical networks (or vertical social networks) connect people who have very specific interests or passions. If your target audience is part of a vertical social network, you may be able to integrate that network into your inbound or content marketing strategy. This can also apply to niche groups within broader social networks like Facebook & Linkedin groups.

Part of the Glossary of Web Terms The Semantic Web is a project under the direction of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which aims to extend the current Web and will allow you to find, share, and combine information more easily. It’s requires a change in the way we currently design & build for the web and separates the …

Optimising your website for search, commonly referred to as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is vital if you are going to succeed online. It’s possible to do it yourself but you will get much better results if it’s handled by specialist web consultants such as Narrative Industries (previously THBOOM!) because, in addition to it being an ongoing process, the requirements are in …

We developed a simple brand & web strategy for Paul Costelloe Studio, a new online store selling limited-edition ladieswear exclusively designed by Paul Costelloe. Renowned as a fashion designer with a love of detail & fine tailoring, Paul Costelloe’s range for women regularly opens London Fashion Week but, until now, it has not been possible to buy latest season’s designs online. The …

We’ve used several eCommerce solutions over the years but have been very impressed with newcomer Shopify. Shopify provides a low-cost entry point into eCommerce; for as little as £20 per month you can get a fully functional, very respectable, easy to use online store. It’s not enterprise level but it is surprisingly well made and, for anyone wanting to get into eCommerce, …

A generic term that literally means “The things that are held or included in something” but, in terms of a website, relates to the text, video, audio, images, downloadable PDFs etc. that populate your site. Ideally your content strategy should ensure all content is relevant and of interest to your targeted audience so that it provides some value or worth …

Not to be confused with visitors or visits, hits refer to the number of requests made on a server. A web age with ten images, for example, will require 11 hits (one for the html page and one for each image). The number of hits provides valuable information for optimising high traffic sites but can be misleading and useless for …

e-books or ebooks are electronic versions of books which can be downloaded from the internet and read on your PC or hand held device. Originally developed to be compatible with screen readers for visually impaired, they are now the standard form for Kindle and other hand held devices and sales of eBooks now account for a sizeable proportion of online book …

You may have seen a little flurry of activity recently when some horse meat found it’s way into beef ready meals. This happened because manufacturers of ready-meals wanted to sell cheaper products which, in turn, led to squeezing the supply chain and, ultimately, sloppy standards. Why is this relevant to your online presence? Well, the answer is simply that you get …

Google Bomb or Googlewashing is when a group of people collaborate to get Google to associate a specific keyword with a particular link, image, person or site. When done successfully it’s known as a Google bomb and was brought to fame when a search for for ‘dumb m*th*rf*ck*r’ sent people to a site about George Bush.

A game where you find a unique combination of words that brings up one result. Ideally you then complete the game by telling the site owner they are a GoogleWhack. The comedian Dave Gorman made a film and comedy routine about it.

A Conversion Funnel is a preset journey that is optimised to take the visitor down a specific path. The end result may be a purchase or a sign-up or a download, but the term refers to any funnel with a goal at the end. Inbound Marketing is heavily focussed on moving the visitor down the stages of of the conversion …

We all wanted to see a Facebook Phone or Facebook OS because it’s big and exciting and we like the shiny things but what they’ve actually done is much, much cleverer and far more likely to cane your data plan.

Organic Search (or Natural search) results display websites that aren’t paying to have top position – as opposed to the sponsored ads. Getting good organic search results is the goal of SEO and requires a balance of on-site and off-site optimisation.

Blogs that are written by companies and organisations are known as business blogs. A number CEOs of major organisations blog, and some businesses encourage their staff to do the same. It can be a powerful way to communicate directly with your customers, partners, suppliers and employees and enables a fast response to any issues and provide . They fit nicely …

Off-site SEO is the side of search engine optimisation concerned with what happens away from your site, most commonly getting inbound links. While there’s a lot of issues surrounding inbound links and companies selling them, Google ranks websites according to authority so a hundred links from generic websites won’t be as powerful or effective for SEO as one link from …

Information displayed through graphics. Most commonly this will be a jpg/gif showing statistical data in a visually pleasing and easy to understand way. The goal of the best infographics is to render complex data into self explanatory visuals.

A shortened form of the word weblog, blogs are easy to use, self-publishing platforms that have grown to cover practically every aspect of human interest. Micro-blogging (Twitter), photo blogging (instagram), vlogs (video blogs) and other variations have sprung up. Usually targeted to one niche or interest, some of the top blogs have grown huge following followings with some in the …

A Content Management System (CMS) is software that allows the owner of a website to edit and add content ( text, images, video etc ) usually through a web browser interface. CMS take many forms but they all remove or reduce the need to have a developer make changes to website, saving time & money and putting the site owner …

Many people like to subscribe to a web site using an aggreator or newsreader so they can see new articles from a range of places in one place without having to go to the site. If you provide a feed from your site, as practically all blogs, job listing and modern sites do, it’s likely to be in Atom or …

The page a visitor arrives at when they click a link in an email, a banner advertisement or other promotional content. This may be a page on your site or a specific microsite and there is an entire strategy to designing effective landing pages that convert visitors when they arrive. Also refered to as a destination page.

Around 8,000,000 people in the UK use their smartphones to access the Internet every day*. Almost 50% of all mobile phones in the UK are smartphones (that’s around 23 million). £830million is being spent online in the UK, every week, and 20% of that is through mobile devices. It’s time to understand how the mobile web & mCommerce impacts your business.

With recent advances in search engine algorithms, black hat SEO has become almost impossible and many of the techniques commonly used (and still sold to naive webmasters) will actively undermining your search position.

The Hitman movie is adapted from a video game and, as part of the film’s promotion MTV were giving away a trip to Russia. We created a Hitman Trailer for MTV with our own, original Russian-themed animation and mixing it with official film footage to come up 60 second adverts. The adverts ran throughout the month on MTV Europe.

Another MTV project for a film promotion, this time for romantic comedy Heartbreak Kid starring Ben Stiller. The MTV promotion included a holiday competition to win a trip to Mexico which gave us licence to have some fun with the graphics. Day of the dead, chihuahuas, mariachis… yup, we used every clichéd stereotype in the book to create the a …